The people paraded their red flags and I was among them on the stone they struck, in the thunderous march and in the struggle's lofty songs, I saw how they conquered step by step, Their resistance alone was road, and isolated they were like broken bits of a star, mouthless and lusterless. Joined in the unity made silence, they were fire, indestructible song, the slow passage of mankind on earth turned into depths and battles. They were dignity that fought whatever was trampled, and they awakened like a system, the order of lives that touched the door and sat down in the main hall with their flags.

When the rice withdraws from the earththe grains of its flour,when the wheat hardens its little hip-joints and lifts its face of a thousand hands,I make my way to the grove where the woman and the man embrace,to touch the innumerable seaof what continues.

I am not a brother of the implement carried on the tide as in a cradle of embattled mother-of-pearl:I do not tremble in the territory of the dying garbage, I do not wake at the shock of the dark that is frightened by the hoarse leaf-stalks of the sudden bell,I cannot be, I am not the traveller under whose shoes the last remnants of the wind throb and the waves come back rigid out of time to die.

I carry in my hand the dove that sleeps recumbent in the seedand in its dense ferment of lime and bloodAugust lives,raised out of its deep goblet the month lives:with my hand I encircle the new shadow of the wing that is growing:the root and the feather that will form the thicket of tomorrow.

The immense growth of the drop, and the eyelid yearning to be opennever diminish, neither beside the balcony of iron hands

nor in the maritime winter of the abandoned, nor in my late footstep:for I was born in order to be born, to contain the stepsof all that approaches, of all that beats on my breast like a new trembling heart.

Lives resting beside my clothes like parallel dovesor contained in my own existence and in my lawless soundin order to return to being, to lay hold on the air denuded of its leafand on the moist birth of the soil in the wreath: how longcan I return and be, how long can the odour of the most deeply buried flowers, of the waves most finelypulverized on the high rocks, preserve in me their homelandwhere they can return to be fury and perfume?

There are lone cemeteries.tombs full of soundless bones,the heart threading a tunnel,a dark, dark tunnel:like a wreck we die to the very core, as if drowning at the heart or collapsing inwards from skin to soul.There are corpsesclammy slabs for feet,there is death in the bones,like a pure sound,a bark without its dog,out of certain bells, tombs swelling in this humidity like lament or rain.I see, when alone at times,coffins under sailsetting out with the pale dead, women in their dead braids,bakers as white as angels,thoughtful girls married to notaries,coffins ascending the vertical river of the dead,the wine-dark river to its source,with their sails swollen with the sound of death, filled with the silent noise of death.Death is drawn to soundlike a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer, comes to knock with a ring, stoneless and fingerless. comes to shout without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat.Nevertheless its footsteps sound,and its clothes echo, hushed like a tree.I do not know, I am ignorant, I hardly seebut it seems to me that its song has the colour of wet violets,violets well used to the earth,since the face of death is green,and the gaze of death greenwith the etched moisture of a violet's leaf and its grave colour of exasperated winter.But death goes about the earth also, riding a broom lapping the ground in search of the dead - death is in the broom,it is the tongue of death looking for the dead, the needle of death looking for thread.Death lies in our cots:in the lazy mattresses, the black blankets, lives at full stretch and then suddenly blows, blows sound unknown filling out the sheets and there are beds sailing into a harbour where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral.

Only the most ancient love on earthwill wash and comb the statue of the children,straighten the feet and knees.The water rises, the soap slithers,and the pure body comes up to breathethe air of flowers and motherhood.

Oh, the sharp watchfulness,the sweet deception,the lukewarm struggle!

Now the hair is a tangledpelt criscrossed by charcoal,by sawdust and oil,soot, wiring, crabs,until love, in its patience,sets up buckets and sponges,combs and towels,and, out of scrubbing and combing, amber,primal scrupulousness, jasmines,has emerged the child, newer still,running from the mother's armsto clamber again on its cyclone,go looking for mud, oil, urine and ink,hurt itself, roll about on the stones.Thurs, newly washed, the child springs into life,for later, it will have time for nothing morethan keeping clean, but with the life lacking.

All those who used to give me adviceare crazier every day.Luckily I ignored themand they went to another citywhere they all live togetherconstantly swapping sombreros.

They were worthy subjects,politically thoughtful,and every fault I committedcaused them such sufferingthat they turned grey and wrinkled,gave up eating chestnuts,and an autumnal melancholyfinally left them delirious.

Now I don't know what to be,forgetful or respectful;to continue to give them counselor reproach them for their madness.I cannot claim independence.I am lost in so much foliage---should I leave, or enter,travel or linger,buy cats or tomatoes?

I will try to understandwhat I mustn't do, then do it,and so be able to justifythe ways which might escape me,for if I don't make mistakes,who will believe in my errors?If I go on being wise,no one will notice me.

But I will try to change,offer greetings with great careand look to appearanceswith dedication and zealuntil I am all that they wish,as one might be and another might not,till I exist only in others.

And then, if they leave me in peace,I am going to change completely,and differ with my skin;and when I have another mouth,other shoes, other eyes;when it is all different,and no one can recognize me,since anything else is beyond me,I shall go on doing the same.

I knew you in the big bay boats, Cristobal,on a day when the nitercame down to the sea's edge, in November'sscalding investiture.I remember some ravished serenity,the summits of metal and the unmoving water;and a man wetted down in his sweat,moving a cargo of snow, whose trade is with boats.For nitrate moved with the snow, shedon the harrowing shoulders, blind inthe boatholds, and falling:for the stevedores, the heroes of morning,bitten with acids, death'simminent timeservers, takingthe prodigal niter, unshaken.Cristobal: this keepsake's for you---a shoveler's fellowship, heartstumid with strain; the unascending eaglesinto whose breathing the acidsand homicide gases have entered:for all good men brought down in the street,who wheeltoward the broken cross of their pampa.Cristobal: no more of that now.This paper commends you to all,all mariners, menblackened with boats in the bay. My eyesgo with yours in this stint,my force in the heft of your shovel,in a desert's substance---standing near to you,loading the blood and the snow and unloading itTranslated by Ben Belitt

Here comes the tree, the treeof the storm, the tree of the people.Its heroes rise up from the earthas leaves from the sap,and the wind spangles the whisperingmultitude's foliage,until the seed fallsagain from the bread to the earth.

Here comes the tree, the treenourished by naked corpses,corpses scourged and wounded,corpses with impossible faces,impaled on spears,reduced to dust in the bonfire,decapitated by ax,quartered by horse,crucified in church.

Here comes the tree, the treewhose roots are alive,it fed on martyrdom's nitrate,its roots consumed blood,and it extracted tears from the soil:raised them through its branches,dispersed them on its architecture.They were invisible flowers-sometimes, buried flowers,other times they illuminatedits petals, like planets.

And in the branches mankindharvestedthe hard corollas,passed them from hand to handlike magnolias or pomegranates,and suddenly, they opened the earth,gew up to the stars.

This is the tree of the emancipated.The earth tree, the cloooud tree,The bread tree, the arrow tree,the fist tree, the firee tree.The stormy water of our nocturnalepoch floods it,but its mast balancesthe arena of its might.

At times, the branches brokenby wrath fall again,and a foreboding ashcovers its ancient majesty:just as it survived times past,so too it rose from agonyuntil a secret hand,countless arms, the people,preserved the fragments,hidd invariable trunks,and their lips were the leavesof the immense divided tree,disseminated everywhere,walking with its roots.This is the tree, the treeof the people, of all peoplesstruggling for freedom.

Look at its hair:toouch its rennewed rays:plunge your hands intto the factorieswhere its pulsing fruitpropagates its light each day.Raise this earth in your hands,partake of this splendor,take your heart and your horseand mount guard on tthe frontier,at the limits of its leaves.

Defend the detiny of its corollas,share the hostile nights,guarrd the cycle of the dawn,breathe in the sstarry heights,sustaining the tree, the treethat grows in the middle of the earth.

That time when I moved among happeningsin the midst of my mournful devotions; that time when I cherished a leaflet of quartz, and stared at a lifetime's vocation.

I ranged in the markets of avarice where goodness is bought for a price, breathed the insensate miasmas of envy, the inhuman contention of masks and existences.

I endured in the bog-dweller's element; the lily that breaks on the water in a sudden disturbance of bubbles and blossoms, devoured me. Whatever the foot sought, the spirit deflected, or sheered toward the fang of the pit.

So my poems took beina, in travail retrieved from the thorn, like a penance, wrenched by a seizure of hands, out of solitude; or they parted for burial their secretest flower in immodesty's garden.

Estranged to myself, like shadow on water that moves through a corridor's fathoms, I sped through the exile of each man's existence, this way and that, and so, to habitual loathing; for I saw that their being was this: to stifle one half of existence's fullness like fish in an alien limit of ocean. And there, in immensity's mire, I encountered their death;

A wine-spotted waist for the tavern-god treading the wreckage of glasses, disheveling dawn's glowing divisions- a moistening rose in the prostitute's whimper, where the wind spends the fevers of morning in a windowpane's void, and the gunman, still booted for vengeance, in a sour exhalation of pistols, and a blue-eyed disaster, sleeps sound.

Scarcely with my reason, with my fingers with slow waters indolently swamped,I fall into the realm of forget-me-nots,into a tenacious air of mournfulness,a decayed forgotten halland a cluster of bitter clover.

I fall into the shadows, to the core,of shattered things,and I see spiders, and I graze on thicketsof secret inconclusive woods,and I pace through soaked, uprooted fibersat the living heart of matter and silence.

Oh lovely matter, oh rose of dry wings,as I drown I cling to your petalsmy feet are burning with fatigue,I kneel in your harsh cathedralbeating my lips with an angel.

It is because I am myselffaced with your color of world,faced with your pale dead swords,faced with your united hearts,faced with your silent multitude.

I am the one facing your wave of dying fragrances,wrapped in autumn and resistance;about to take a funeral journeyalong the ridges of yellow scars;I with my lamentations that have no genesishungry, sleepless, alonearriving at your mysterious essence.

I see the course of your petrified currents,the growth of frozen, interrupted hands.I hear your oceanic vegetationrustling - shaken by night and furyand I feel the leaves dying inward - to the very corefusing their green substances to your abandoned immobility.

My dog has died.I buried him in the gardennext to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,his bad manners and his cold nose,and I, the materialist, who never believedin any promised heaven in the skyfor any human being,I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdomwhere my dog waits for my arrivalwaving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,of having lost a companionwho was never servile.His friendship for me, like that of a porcupinewithholding its authority,was the friendship of a star, aloof,with no more intimacy than was called for,with no exaggerations:he never climbed all over my clothesfilling me full of his hair or his mange,he never rubbed up against my kneelike other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,paying me the attention I need,the attention requiredto make a vain person like me understandthat, being a dog, he was wasting time,but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,he'd keep on gazing at mewith a look that reserved for me aloneall his sweet and shaggy life,always near me, never troubling me,and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tailas we walked together on the shores of the seain the lonely winter of Isla Negrawhere the wintering birds filled the skyand my hairy dog was jumping aboutfull of the voltage of the sea's movement:my wandering dog, sniffing awaywith his golden tail held high,face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,as only dogs know how to be happywith only the autonomyof their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

I can't tell you quicklyWhat I ought to tell you,Say man, pardon me, you'll knowThat even though you don't listen to my wordsI never took time off to weep or sleepAnd that I've been with you when I couldn't see youFor a long time and I'll be there till the end.

I understand that many people are thinking,"Say, what's Pablo doing?" I'm here.If you look for me on this streetYou'll find me with my violinReady to singAnd to die.

It's nobody's problemNot for them, nor for you,And if you listen well, in the rain,You will be able to hearThat I come back and go away and stay.And you'll know when I must leave.

If my words aren't heardDon't doubt that I'm the one I was.There is no silence that doesn't end.When the moment arrives, wait for me,And let everyone know that I'm comingTo the street, with my violin.

The pigeons visited Pushkin And pecked at his melancholy The gray bronze statue talks to the pigeons With all the patience of bronze.

The modern pigeons Don't understand him The language of birds now Is different. They make droppings on Pushkin Then fly to Mayakovsky. His statue seems to be of lead. He seems to have been Made of bullets. They didn't sculpt his tenderness - Just his beautiful arrogance. If he is a wrecker Of tender things How can he live among violets In the moonlight In love?

Something is always missing in these statues Which are fixed rigidly in the direction of their times. Either they are slashed Into the air with a combat knife Or they are left seated Transformed into a tourist in a garden. And other people, tired of riding horseback No longer can dismount and eat there. Statues are really bitter things Because time piles up In deposits on them, oxidizing them And even the flowers come to cover Their cold feet. The flowers aren't kisses. They've also come there to die.

White birds in the daytime And poets at night And a great ring of shoes surrounding The iron Mayakovosky And his frightful bronze jacket And his iron unsmiling mouth.

One time when it was late and I was almost asleep On the edge of the river, far off in the city I could hear the verses rising, the psalms Of the reciters in succession. Was Mayakovsky listening? Do statues listen? (...)

Three triangles of birds crossed Over the enormous ocean which extended In winter like a green beast. Everything just lay there, the silence, The unfolding gray, the heavy light Of space, some land now and then.

Over everything there was passing A flight And another flight Of dark birds, winter bodies Trembling triangles Whose wings, Frantically flapping, hardly Can carry the gray cold, the desolate days

From one place to another Along the coast of Chile. I am here while from one sky to another The trembling of the migratory birds Leaves me sunk inside myself, inside my own matter Like an everlasting well Dug by an immovable spiral.

Now they have disappeared Black feathers of the sea Iron birds From steep slopes and rock piles Now at noon I am in front of emptiness. It’s a winter Space stretched out And the sea has put Over its blue face A bitter mask.

What have you done you intellectualists? you mystifiers? you false existentialist sorcerers? you surrealistic poppies shining on a tomb? you pale grubs in the capitalist cheese? What did you do about the kingdom of anguish? about this dark human being kicked into submission? about this head submerged in manure? about this essence of harsh, trampled lives?

You didn't do anything but escape you sold piles of debris you looked for heavenly hairs cowardly plants, broken fingernails "pure beauty" "magic". Your works were those of poor frightened folk trying to keep your eyes from looking trying to protect their delicate pupils so you could make for your living a plate of dirty scraps which the masters flung to you. Without seeing that the stones are in agony, without defending, without conquering, blinder than the wreaths in the cemetery when the rain falls on the motionless rotten flowers on the tomb.

Spain was a taut, dry drum-head Daily beating a dull thud Flatlands and eagle's nest Silence lashed by the storm.

How much, to the point of weeping, in my soul I love your hard soil, your poor bread, Your poor people, how much in the deep place Of my being there is still the lost flower Of your wrinkled villages, motionless in time And your metallic meadows Stretched out in the moonlight through the ages, Now devoured by a false god.

All your confinement, your animal isolation While you are still conscious Surrounded by the abstract stones of silence, Your rough wine, your smooth wine Your violent and dangerous vineyards.

Solar stone, pure among the regions Of the world, Spain streaked With blood and metal, blue and victorious Proletarian Spain, made of petals and bullets Unique, alive, asleep - resounding. (...)

One morning in a cold monthIn an agonizing month, spotted with mud and smokeA month that wouldn't get on its knees, a sad besieged, unlucky monthWhen from beyond my wet window panes you could hear the jackalsHowling with their rifles and their teeth full of blood thenWhen we didn't have more hope than a dream of more gun powder, when we believed by thenThat the world was full of nothing but devouring monsters and furies,Then, breaking through the frost of that cold month in Madrid, in the early morning mistI saw with my own eyes, with this heart which looks outI saw the bright ones arrive, the victorious fightersFrom that lean, hard, tested rock of a brigade.

Is was the troubled time when the womenCarried an emptiness like a terrible burning coal,And Spanish death, sharper and more bitter than other deathsFilled the fields which until then had been honored by wheat.

Through the streets the beaten blood of men had joinedWith water flowing out of the destroyed hearts of housesThe bones of dismembered children, the piercingSilence of women in mourning, the eyesOf the defenseless closed forever,It was like sadness and loss, like a spat-upon gardenComrades,ThenI saw you,And my eyes even now are full of prideBecause I saw you arriving through theMorning mist, coming to the pure brow of SpainSilent and firmLike bells before daybreakSo solemn with blue eyes coming from far, far awaycoming from your corners, from your lost homelands,from your dreamsFull of burning sweetness and gunsTo defend the Spanish city where freedom was trappedAbout to fall and be bitten by beasts.

Brothers, from now onYour purity and your strength, your solemn storyWill be known by child and man, by woman and old one,May it reach all beings who have no hope, may it descend into the mines corroded by sulphuric air,May it climb the inhuman stairways to the slaveMay all the stars, all the wheat stalks of Spain and the worldWrite your name and your harsh struggleAnd your victory, strong and earthy as a red oak tree.

Because you have given new birth by your sacrificeTo the lost faith, the empty soul, the confidence in the earthAnd through your abundance, your nobility, your deaths,Like through a valley of hard, bloody rocksPasses an immense river of dovesMade of steel and hope.

Starting at Singapore it smelled of opium The good Englishman knew what he was doing At world conferences he thundered Against the secret drug-lords And in his colonies every port sent up a cloud of authorized smoke with an official number and a juicy franchise. The official gentleman in London dressed like a spotless nightingale (with striped pants and a shirt starched into armor) A nightingale trilling against the pusher in the shadows. But here in the Orient the gentleman unmasked himself and sold lethargy on every corner.(...)

A scent like a sword forged with the acid of plums found by a road, the sugary kisses that linger in the teeth, the drops of life sprinkling on the fingertips, the sweet erotic heart, the yards, the haystacks, the inviting secret rooms in the vast houses, mattresses sleeping in the past, the raging green valley seen from above, from a hidden window: adolescence all flickering and burning like a lamp knocked over in the rain.

If I could speak with birds,with oysters and with little lizards,with the foxes of the Dark Forest, with the exemplary penguins; if the sheep, the fluffy and lazy dogs, and the horses that pull carts could understand me,

if I could discuss things with cats, if hens would listen to me!In this world which runs and is silent, I want more communications,other languages, other signs,I want to know this world.

There are days that haven't arrived yet, that are being madelike bread or chairs or a productfrom the pharmacies or the woodshops:there are factories of days to come:they exist, craftsmen of the soulwho raise and weigh and preparecertain bitter or beautiful daysthat arrive suddenly at the doorto reward us with an orangeor to instantly murder us.

Oh, Chile, long petal of sea and wine and snow,oh when oh when and whenoh when will I be home again? The sash of yourblack-white foam will encircle my waist and my poetrywill flood your land.

My people, truly, in the springtime does my name echo in your ears,do you recognize in me a river flowing past your door?

I am a river. If you strain to hear beneath the minesof Antofagasta, to the south of Osorno or the cordillera in the Melipilla, in Temuco, in a night of dewy stars and rustling laurel, if you place your ear to the ground you will hear me flowing submerged and singing.October, oh springtime, let me be again among my people!

Oh patria, patria, oh native land, whenand when and when, when will I be home again?

We are the clumsy passersby, we push past each other with elbows,with feet, with trousers, with suitcases,we get off the train, the jet plane, the ship, we step downin our wrinkled suits and sinister hats.We are all guilty, we are all sinners,we come from dead-end hotels or industrial peace,this might be our last clean shirt,we have misplaced our tie,yet even so, on the edge of panic, pompous,sons of bitches who move in the highest circlesor quiet types who don’t owe anything to anybody,we are one and the same, the same in time’s eyes,or in solitude’s: we are the poor devilswho earn a living and a death workingbureautragically or in the usual ways,sitting down or packed together in subway stations,boats, mines, research centers, jails,universities, breweries,(under our clothes the same thirsty skin),(the hair, the same hair, only in different colors).

I am the Pablo Bird,bird of a single feather,a flier in the clear shadowand obscure clarity,my wings are unseen,my ears resoundwhen I walk among the treesor beneath the tombstoneslike an unlucky umbrellaor a naked sword,stretched like a bowor round like a grape,I fly on and on not knowing,wounded in the dark night,who is waiting for me,who does not want my song,who desires my death,who will not know I'm arrivingand will not come to subdue me,to bleed me, to twist me,or to kiss my clothes,torn by the shrieking wind.That's why I come and go,fly and don't fly but sing:I am the furious birdof the calm storm.

I laugh,I smileat the old poets,I cherish alltheir poetry,all their dew,moon, diamond, dropletsfrom submerged silverthat my graybeard brothersfestoon onto roses,butI smile;for they always say "I,"every where they gosomething occursand it is always "I,"down these streets,only theyor their beloved,walk down these streets,no one else,there are no fishermen about,no bookstore merchants,no bricklayers walking about,no one stumbles and fallsfrom their scaffolding,not one person suffers,not one person loves,only my poor brother,the poet,everything is happento himand to his beloved,no one livesbut him, the solitary poet,no one weeps from hungeror anger,not one person suffersin all his poetrybecause he was unableto pay the rent,not one personin all his poetryis evicted from his housewith everything he owns,and in factories,nothing happens, no,all our umbrellas, cups and bowls, are forgedbombs, guns and trains are built,the elements are minedby scraping up hell,there is a worker's strike,military police arriveand open fire,they fire upon the people,which is also to say,against poetry,ai, but my brother,the poet,was in love,or he was agonizingfor in his throbbing heartis only the sea,and distant ports of callyes, he loves their names,and he writes about the oceanthe one he has never seen,when life is as fullas the grain from an ear of cornhe walks by, never wonderingonce how to harvest corn,and he rides upon waveswithout ever touching the shore,and, now and then,he is moved, perhaps profoundlyand deeply, but with despair,you see, he is too sublimeto fit inside his own skin,he gets himself ensnared, unscrambled,he declares that he must be accursed,with great sighs he drags about the crossof darkness,he knows that he is at odds witheveryone else in the world,still, he eats bread everymorning but he has neverseen a bakernever attended unionmeeting of bakers,and so, my poor brother,he becomes intentionally tricky,he twists his words and writhesand finds himselfand his wordscomplex,complex,ai, that's the word,I am no betterthan my brother,but I smile,because when I walk down the streetI am the only one who does not exist,all of life floods about melike tidal rivers,but I am the onlyone who is now invisible,I have no cryptic shadows,no melancholia, nothing is dark,you see, people speak to me,people want to tell me things,to talk about their families,all their grief, all their gaiety,people pass by, and peopletalk to me about things,look at all the things they do!They chop wood,string up electrical lights,they bake bread late into the night,our morning bread,with pick ax and ironsthey pierce the entrailsof the earthand convert the mineralsinto locks,they rise into the sky andcarry airmail and sobs and kisses,someone is standingin every single doorway,someone is being born,my beloved is waiting for me,and, as I walk along, these thingscall out for me to sing them,but how can I? I haven't time,I must examine everythingI hurry home now,hurry off to the Party office;what else can I do?People everywhere ask meto sing for them, yes, sing forever,until everyone is drownedin dreams and in colors,ai, life is a giftflooded with songs, the gift fliesopen and a flockof wild birds fly outand they all want to tell me things,they perch on my shoulders,life is a struggle,just like a rolling river andall of humanitywants to tell me,to tell you,why they are struggling,and, if they are to be executed,why they will die,and I pass them all and haven'ttime enough for so many lives,I wantthem all to liveinside my soul,to sing out my song,I am not important,I have no free timefor my own passions,all night and all dayI must write this downwhat is occurring, pleaselet me try not to miss anything.It is true that, extraordinarily,at times I do get tired,I look up at the cosmos,I lie down in the grass, a bugthe same color as a violinmarches by,I place my palm acrossa sapling breastor between the hipsof the woman I love,I try to study the silkof the trembling night,all frozen with destiny,thenI feel waves of mysterypouring out from my soul,ai, childhood, my little selfweeping in a corner,my heartbreaking youth,I feel so sleepyso I sleepjust like a log,in no time I amunconscious,with or without destiny,with or without my lover,and when I wake upall the night is long gone,all the streets have come alive without me,the poor barrio girlsare off on their way to work,fishermen returnfrom the sea,the minersin brand new bootsare going down into the mines,yes, everything is alive, awake,yes, everyone ishurrying back and forth,and I have scarcely enough timeto struggle into my clothing,I must fly:no on mustpass by without my seeingwhere he is going,what she is doing.I cannot live withoutlife,without people being people,I must run and look and listenand sing,stars have nothingfor me, solitudebears not a single flower,not a single fruit.For my life, give meevery life,give me every agonythe world has ever hadand I will transform them allinto desire.Give meevery rapture,even the most secret,because if not,how will they ever be known?I must tell them,please, give me yourdaily strugglesso I can make up my song,that way we will be together,shoulder to shoulder,everyone single one,let my song unite us:this song of the invisible mansinging along with everyone.

We have to discard the pastand, as one buildsfloor by floor, window by window,and the building rises,so do we go on throwing downfirst, broken tiles,then pompous doors,until out of the pastdust risesas if to crashagainst the floor,smoke risesas if to catch fire,and each new dayit gleamslike an emptyplate.There is nothing, there is always nothing.It has to be filledwith a new, fruitfulspace,then downwardtumbles yesterdayas in a wellfalls yesterday's water,into the cisternof all still without voice or fire.It is difficult to teach bonesto disappear,to teach eyesto closebutwe do itunrealizing.It was all alive,alive, alive, alivelike a scarlet fishbut timepassed over its dark clothand the flash of the fishdrowned and disappeared.Water water waterthe past goes on fallingstill a tangleof bonesand of roots;it has been, it has been, and nowmemories mean nothing.Now the heavy eyelidcovers the light of the eyeand what was once livingnow no longer lives;what we were, we are not.And with words, although the lettersstill have transparency and sound,they change, and the mouth changes;the same mouth is now another mouth;they change, lips, skin, circulation;another being has occupied our skeleton;what once was in us now is not.It has gone, but if the call, we reply;"I am here," knowing we are not,that what once was, was and is lost,is lost in the past, and now will not return.

To whoever is not listening to the seathis Friday morning, to whoever is cooped upin house or office, factory or womanor street or mine or harsh prison cell:to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,I arrive and open the door of his prison,and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,a great fragment of thunder sets in motionthe rumble of the planet and the foam,the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,I ceaselessly must listen to and keepthe sea's lamenting in my awareness,I must feel the crash of the hard waterand gather it up in a perpetual cupso that, wherever those in prison may be,wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,I may be there with an errant wave,I may move, passing through windows,and hearing me, eyes will glance upwardsaying "How can I reach the sea?"And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,the starry echoes of the wave,a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,a rustling of salt withdrawing,the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the seawill make their answer to the shuttered heart.